Ancient Sparta used range voting... sort of

By Brad Porter.

This page is based on the book

James S. Fishkin:
The Voice of the People: Public Opinion & Democracy, Yale University Press 1995

Previously to the passage we quote, J.S.Fishkin goes into detail about the Athenian
Assembly model in Greece, which was an example of how to conduct
representation in a large city-state that in particular inspired
the USA's founding fathers. It was based on random selection of citizens to
serve as legislators, and an assembly wherein a huge chunk of the
population literally got together in a massive group and hammered out
the issues of governance.

FISHKIN QUOTE:
Consider a second ancient model of democracy, very different from
the extended debate in the Athenian Assembly or its citizens.

In ancient Sparta, members of the Council were elected by a method
called The Shout.
The order in which candidates to the Council were
considered was determined by lot [i.e. by a clearly-random process].
[Hence] this order was not known to the
impartial evaluators who were seated in another room with writing
tablets. The evaluators'
job was simply to assess the loudness of the
cheering each candidate received when he walked in front of the
assembled throng. The candidate receiving the loudest shouts and
applause was deemed the winner.

Missing in the Spartan method was the entire social context of
careful debate and deliberative argument fostered by the Athenian
institutions of the Assembly, the citizens'
juries, the legislative
commissions, and the Council.
Aristotle dismissed the Spartan
"applaudometer" as childish.
Yet if we ask which model of ancient
democracy we have come closer to realizing in our modern quest for
direct democracy, we must concede that there are ways in which the
Spartan model is closer than the Athenian to contemporary practices.